How can our rural communities become more resilient?

March 19th, 2012 - John Plodinec

In a recent post (A Tale of Two Towns), I wrote about two rural communities – one undergoing a long slow death, the other desperately trying to come back from a tornado. In that post, I said,

“… we must reach out both to the towns torn by tornadoes and those whose lifeblood is slowly dripping away. We must help them find new purposes, new reasons for being. We must be midwives to their rebirth…”

A little flowery, but certainly heartfelt. However, I didn’t offer any suggestions for how to impregnate rural communities with a new purpose. In order to do so I’m going to channel my inner Brian Dabson (RUPRI); James Clifton (Gallup); and Bruce Katz (Brookings). With their help, here is my prescription for the repurposing of a rural community.

Know thyself. Often, rural communities are painfully aware of the problems they face, but haven’t taken the time to do a dispassionate assessment of themselves as a community. They see the decline, or the danger of decline, but haven’t really looked at their strengths and weaknesses, or any opportunities that may be out there for them. But who knows their communities better than they do? Who else knows who are the suppliers and the customers for local businesses? Who else knows whether there are opportunities to replace “imported” (from outside the community) goods and services with something available inside? Who else knows what makes the community special? Who else knows what about the community needs changing?

Further, most rural communities probably haven’t looked at themselves in their regional setting. Does the community play a role in its regional economy? Is there a regional strategy it can be a part of? Are there resources in the region the community can take advantage of – not only financial or material, but human, for example, to help in planning? Too often, as Dabson says, “Regional collaboration is often regarded as an unnatural act.”

A recent experiment in New York State (and yes, Virginia, most of New York State is quite rural!) points out how effective regional collaboration can be. Initially, the state divided itself into nine regions reflecting existing interdependencies. Governor Cuomo championed an innovative regional approach to economic development based on partnerships across each region – government, business, academia, NGOs. Although there hasn’t been time for great successes to emerge, there is now real hope in small towns across the state, because they are working together, pooling resources, aiming for a more vibrant future.

It’s not innovators but entrepreneurs who hold the keys to the future. A vibrant community is one where people don’t have jobs, they have careers. People often forget that while Apple may have owed its start to the innovations of Steve Wozniak, it owes its present health to the entrepreneurial spirit of Steve Jobs. Is there someone in the community who has a good idea for substituting a local product for something imported? Is there someone in the community who has a good idea for a new product using local resources? Do they know how to market what they have? Do they have the funding? Could they “re-purpose” the community? A key to re-inventing rural communities is to encourage this kind of entrepreneurial thinking.

All solutions are local. If a rural community wants a vibrant future, it can’t look to the federal government or the state for a “guidebook” on how to achieve that. As Clifton says.

“It is wrong thinking to imagine that Washington has solutions.”

The only worthwhile guidance that any of us outside the community can provide is that the community must define its own desired future, one that can be reached from where the community is now. To reach it will require patient and persistent effort on the part of the entire community – not just the leadership, but everyone. And that means that everyone in the community has to buy in to a common vision of the future.

Resources are wherever you find them. Taking action – trying to create a different future for the community – requires “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” In other words, it takes resources and effort to change the community’s future. Some of those resources can come from within. For example, in the very small town of Sangudo, Alberta (population 400), a group of retirees created an investment co-op. They pooled their funds to support promising business opportunities within their own community, and have given Sangudo a new lease on life.

But that doesn’t mean that the community need only rely on its own resources. For example, since 1977, Coastal Enterprises, Inc., has been helping rural communities improve their economies – first in Maine, and then more regionally. It is estimated that there are at least $5 billion in current investments by regional and local Community Development Investment Funds across the country. And let’s not forget that the needed resources may not be financial, but human. The extension services provided by our nation’s land grant colleges and universities offer a wide range of development support to communities willing to use them. While the community might not have a Small Business Development Center, one might be available regionally, or perhaps at the state level.

Communications play an increasingly important role in finding resources. That implies that rural communities should strive to get as much communications bandwidth as possible. Broadband internet access is an obvious part of that, but fostering connections from the community to the world outside is at least as important. Businesses to state or national associations, churches and other faith-based organizations to regional or national groups, ties to professional societies, and, of course, connections between local government and regional and state governmental bodies all can pay dividends to communities otherwise isolated.

Four ingredients making up a simple prescription, but one that can work to revitalize rural communities; one that can work, that is, if a community has the patience, the will, and – yes – the passion for itself to make it work. Whether it’s capitalizing on their space, their soil, or their proximity to an urban center, there are ways for rural communities to re-purpose themselves and to achieve a more vital future. But they have to believe in themselves and the vision they create, and recognize that it will take time to achieve the future they desire.

Tags: community resilience, entrepreneur, future, investing, resilience, rural communities, vision — Comments (0)

Contradictory Information

November 23rd, 2011 - Ian Moore

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A Path to Economic Recovery and Resilience

November 10th, 2011 - John Plodinec

Just over a year ago, I wrote about what a more resilient economy might look like (see Recovering from the Great Recession – What Might a More Resilient Economy Look Like?). I talked about a value-driven rather than a consumer driven economy. That post begged the question, though – how do we get there from here? In the next few paragraphs, I’ll try to outline an answer to that.

Before I do, however, my disclaimer. I am clearly not an economist (I’m not sure that’s a disqualification, since the economists are all over the map on how to recover!). Further, politicians will be making the most crucial economic decisions over the next few months, and they are clearly not economists (not to mention their roles in getting us into this mess in the first place).

Our national economy is in what economists call a liquidity trap. In a liquidity trap, there is relatively little investment because those with money are very risk averse. Consumers don’t spend, businesses don’t hire, and everyone looks at the economic glass as half empty. And that’s what we’re seeing right now – individuals and businesses are paying off their debts, individual debt is at levels not seen since the early 1990’s; those who can are saving at rates not seen since the 1970’s; and businesses are sitting on their cash (and not borrowing) rather than investing in new products and jobs.

The two antipodes of the debate over how to fix our economy – escape the trap – are characterized by the “Spend, Baby, Spend” school and the Tea Party’s call for government austerity. The Spend, Baby, Spend school is epitomized by economists such as Paul Krugman, who vehemently believe that our federal government should be spending more, much more, to spur demand for goods and services. This group points to our nation’s crumbling infrastructure as a place where investment would create jobs, creating demand, and facilitating economic recovery. At its core, this view sees lack of demand for goods and services as the problem that needs to be addressed.

The Tea Party-ers, on the other hand, see the size of our government as the core problem. In this view, a smaller government, with fewer regulations and lower taxes, would put money back into people’s hands to spend on goods and services, thus jump starting the economy.

You’ll notice, however, that neither view really addresses the core problem – how we get out of the liquidity trap. Or, said a little differently, how do we help businesses, in particular, become less risk averse so that they will invest the cash they are now sitting on in new equipment or new jobs. Framed this way, it seems that government spending per se is somewhat irrelevant to getting out of the trap. Recovery will come only when people have confidence once again that there is a secure future. That’s not to say that government spending is unimportant, just that stimulus spending doesn’t really seem to be the right answer.

If this is true, then what should government do to put us on the road to a resilient economy? Simply put, governments should do those things that will remove uncertainty from people’s minds and those things that will make people more confident in their futures. In this light, it seems that we need to take some of the medicines prescribed by both schools of thought to help bring us out of our national malaise.

We need to recognize that the current pace of regulation creation is creating great uncertainties for businesses and individuals. In the first two years of the present administration in Washington, we created more regulations than we did in eight years of the previous administration. Further, whether we like it or not, small businesses are already telling us they won’t be hiring in the near term because of the possible impacts of health insurance reform (and those impacts won’t be fully known until 2014 at the earliest!).

We also need to recognize that our national debt is unsustainable – if we continue on our present path, we as individuals eventually will end up paying exorbitant amounts in taxes to support intolerably high interest rates to service both our national and personal debt. We as individuals or investors or business owners recognize this and are saving at almost unprecedented rates to provide our own safety nets for ourselves.

However, we also have to recognize that the government must continue to make investments that will help us to have a more certain future. We must invest in our infrastructure – not to stimulate spending but to ensure that we can continue to move goods, people, and information where they are needed. If we don’t, we will spend far more to respond to and recover from the disasters that will expose our infrastructure’s fragility.

We also need to heed the lessons we have already learned about what went wrong and put regulations in place that address the root causes of those problems. The current regulatory framework for the financial industry has much that is wrong with it; recently passed legislation is likely to drive smaller community banks – who in the main were not at fault in getting us into this trap – out of business. This will make it more difficult for entrepreneurs and small businesses to get the capital they need to start up or expand their businesses, i.e., will make our economy even less resilient. Meanwhile, many of the more speculative financial sectors remain unregulated even though they were prime actors in our economic tragedy (and are doing nothing to help us recover).

We must provide a safety net to those of our citizens with special needs. Not because of their vulnerability but as an investment in their future and in ours. The safety net should be focused on outcomes – for example, living healthier and more productive lives – rather than means, for example insurance. Just as with our physical infrastructure, if we don’t make these kinds of investments we will spend far more to respond to and recover from the human tragedies that will result.

I don’t think it requires a rocket scientist (or a Ph.D. economist!) to see a path to recovery. It only requires a clear recognition of where we are as a nation, and then some common sense actions to move to where we need to be. We have to cut government spending and the pace of regulation, but we also need to invest in ourselves and take actions to prevent us from falling in the same trap again. At its core, we have to restore our confidence in ourselves if we are to recover. Neither school of thought, neither political party, can or will be successful unless they grasp this simple truth – this is the only path to economic recovery and greater national resilience.

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Searching for Resilience: A Walk in the Woods

October 20th, 2011 - John Plodinec

I read an interesting article recently that crystallized several other thoughts for me. The paper – with the somewhat dry title of Resilience as Resource-based Design of Anticipated Situations (www.resilience-engineering-asso.org/ACTES/2011/Papers/13.pdf) – is couched in the language of safety and risk, but takes a very different approach to identifying resilience than I’ve seen before.

The authors start by talking about traditional safety and risk management approaches. To paraphrase the authors, these approaches have inherent limitations:

• They are based on analysis of failures. They do not reflect either that risks can emerge from “normal” situations, or that some of the greatest risks may actually be unanticipated surprises.
• They seek to mitigate without considering either the real gap between intended actions and real capabilities, or that coping with crises is dependent on “the strategies, initiatives, tinkering and ingenuity brought by individual and collective skills in real time.

The application of these to emergency management seems straightforward and very appropriate.

The authors then go on to quote a definition of resilience by Hollnagel:

The intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions.

I’m not a big fan of defining resilience – too many have spent too much time in what becomes an unproductive exercise in navel contemplation – but the authors put legs under this one by trying to determine how anesthesiologists make decisions both in routine cases and in complex ones. Their conclusions are worth noting because they seem to apply so well to the relationship between the federal government and local community leadership.

• Resilience – in addition to vulnerability assessment – involves consideration of local resources and capabilities.
• Decisions are designed to empower those coping with crisis, and not to control them.
• Organizations should be structured so that local standard practices can be shared.

While some may argue about the conclusions, what was striking to me is the very different way of trying to find resilience. Most of the resilience literature focuses either on vulnerability or on case studies of past disasters. What the authors have done is look at behavior – both in routine and unexpected situations – to try to find clues to resilient behavior.

Thus, if we are trying to judge the resilience of a tree to a high wind, we may walk through the woods looking at one that has fallen and try to judge the cause and how to prevent it from falling. Or, as the authors have done, we can study the forest, during both calm days and those with brisk winds, and see how each tree adapts in its own context.

As we were putting the Community Resilience System (CRS) together, one of the strongest sentiments expressed by our Community Leaders Group was that the CRS had to improve normal operations as well as easing the transition to a new normal. This paper not only agrees with that, but shows that understanding how the community functions in normal conditions is a key to understanding its resilience to a crisis.

In other words, watching how trees bend and sway in the wind can often tell us more about the resilience of trees than exhaustively researching why one fell.

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It can’t happen to me

September 12th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

As we watched Irene skirt along the East Coast, it became very clear that many buildings in both coastal and inland communities could see serious flooding. Also of note was that evidently many owners do not have flood insurance.

Many may not know that regular homeowner’s insurance does not cover flooding. This was the reason for protracted legal cases on insurance reimbursement after Katrina. If a home was destroyed by water (flood), then private insurers did not have to reimburse for damages. If the owner had enough foresight to buy flood insurance—separately purchased through an insurance agent but backed by the US government’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)—then they would be reimbursed. If the home was destroyed by wind, then private insurance would cover—but when a home was simply gone in an area that had both high wind and water, it was very difficult to say which destroyed it.

Homes and buildings in high-risk flood areas with mortgages from federally regulated or insured lenders are required to have flood insurance. But many homes that could flood in an exceptional event are not required to have flood insurance. Such homes are not within a FEMA defined “flood zone.”

Zones that begin with “A” or “V” are high-risk flood zones, and the purchase of flood insurance is federally mandated on loans secured by properties located in communities that participate in the National Flood Insurance Program. Zones “C,” “B,” and “X” have a lower risk of flooding, and the federal mandatory purchase requirements do not apply. “V” flood zones are on the coast and are subject to wind-driven water, i.e., waves. “A” zones are subject to a 1% or greater chance of flooding in any given year; in short, they are in the 100-year flood plain.

Since most people buy their homes with a mortgage, if they are not required to buy flood insurance they assume they do not need it. With water forced many miles inland and torrential rains, many Katrina property owners found out the hard way that they were not going to be reimbursed or only partially reimbursed for their loss.

Access to outside resources—in this case, insurance money—is a critical part of community resilience. In lower flood risk areas, NFIP-backed insurance can be as low as $129 a year. That seems like a very small amount to insure against the risk of total loss.

Resilient communities build public awareness of the risks they face and the potential losses—they do not rely on mortgage companies to tell them their risk. No doubt many without flood insurance wished they had known this as they watched Irene move up the coast.

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Social Capital: A necessary but not sufficicent condition for a resilient recovery

July 8th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

There is a growing (and welcome) recognition amongst many disaster recovery researchers on the importance of social capital in rapid and equitable recovery. This is welcome because all too often disaster mitigation and recovery strategies have ignored this important dimension of our lives.

Welcome as well is a recognition that some actions taken during emergency response may actually erode social capital. Before Hurricane Hugo, in the Charleston region, there was one vehicle access point to Sullivan’s Island and the Isle of Palms. That was the Sawyer Bridge—a drawbridge that was literally spun off its balance point by Hugo’s winds.

Residents of Sullivan’s Island and the Isle of Palms were denied boat access to the island by National Guardsmen. The argument was the islands were overrun with snakes (an unlikely event since a surge would have swept them inland) and that structures were unstable and dangerous. The latter point is valid, but in many other areas throughout the region that actually were harder hit that the two islands, residents could not be stopped from entering because they had multiple points of access. I walked down King Street in downtown Charleston two days after the Hurricane when the street was littered with broken glass and everything from pieces of metal roofs to downed street lights.

From a risk analysis standpoint, the issue was one of someone stepping on a nail or getting cut from a sharp object. I do not question the good intentions of emergency managers here—rather only whether or not they factored social capital into their decision. Some individuals had a chance to sift through their wrecked homes and salvage things that were personally valuable to them. After several days of rain and weeks of being denied access, much of what they could have recovered was no longer recoverable.

Social capital is about holding on to a sense of place and that includes connections to the past. This is why it should be included in our analysis of community resilience.

But at the same time, by vaulting social capital to the forefront, I wonder if there is too much of a backlash.

In the social sciences, we speak of “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions for something to happen. A sufficient condition is one that in and of itself is enough to cause something to happen. A necessary condition is just that, but not sufficient to cause something to happen. Water in the atmosphere is necessary for rain, but not sufficient in and of itself. It needs other factors—temperature, etc. to make rain occur.

In terms of resilience, we should see social capital as necessary. Absent strong bonds to community and place, both created by social capital, community resilience will be seriously degraded. But social capital is not sufficient in and of itself to create community resilience.

Aside from social capital, communities need access to resources for effective and efficient recovery. Resources can come in many forms—help from outside volunteers, insurance, donations, government aid, savings accounts, etc. But these are not sufficient for recovery absent a resolve on the part of community members to stay and rebuild.

In addition, a community whose infrastructure is in bad shape before a disaster will have recovery hindered no matter how much social capital they have.

Recovery is about time in a very important way—how quickly a community can rebound from a disaster. Strong reserves of social capital are necessary, but so are access to resources. So is ensuring that a community’s infrastructure is maintained. There are a lot of necessary parts of recovery. None, alone, are sufficient.

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